Queer Memoir + Rhizomes with Serena Chopra
About the Episode
You know how most stories tend to follow a typical narrative arc? If you’ve been in a writing class of any kind, or have heard of Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero’s Journey,” or have seen even a few mainstream movies, you’ll be familiar with it. There’s a clear beginning, middle, and end. The main character sets out on an adventure, they move triumphantly through a crisis, and then return home with the wisdom they’ve gained in going through the trial.
These stories are neat and tidy. There’s conflict, and then there’s resolution. There’s typically also only one narrator—a person in power who gets the privilege of telling the story through their own lens. These kinds of stories are also highly profitable; it’s easy to sell tidy stories because people enjoy invitations to escape their own, messy realities.
But, when all of our popular stories follow this pattern, whose stories are left out? How does it begin to shape the way we think our own lives should look, and how might that cultural narrative be damaging to us? How, too, do we make sense out of senseless narratives—especially our own?
In this conversation, I talk with Serena Chopra about queer stories—rhizomatic stories—and how they can help us accept all parts of our lives, instead of having to either nearly tie everything together or get rid of whatever the world considers “ugly.”
Episode Details
About Serena (she/her)
Serena Chopra is a teacher, writer, dancer, filmmaker, and a visual and performance artist. She has a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Denver and is a MacDowell Fellow, a Kundiman Fellow, and a Fulbright Scholar. She has two books, This Human (Coconut Books 2013) and Ic (Horse Less Press 2017), as well as two films, Dogana//Chapti (Official Selection at Frameline43, Oregon Documentary Film Festival, and Seattle Queer Film Festival) and Mother Ghosting (2018). She was a featured artist in Harper's Bazaar (India) as well as in the Denver Westword’s “100 Colorado Creatives.” She has recent publications in Sink, Foglifter, Matters of Feminist Practice, and the anthology Alone Together: Love, Grief and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19 (Central Avenue Publishing). In October 2020, Serena co-directed No Place to Go, an artist-made queer haunted house with Kate Speer and Frankie Toan. Serena is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Seattle University.
What We Discuss
The way Serena isn’t just holding contradictions now but sees contradictions as “the situation of life.”
How queer narratives don’t have to be “legible” or easily consumable.
In what ways we’ve repressed our visionary intuitions in order to fit inside of institutions.
The difference between an “arborescent” version of intelligence, and a “rhizomatic” version of intelligence.
Tarot reading as a blueprint of our subconscious and engaging in reading and writing as a form of “bibliomancy.”
The refusal to be contained by the capitalist and colonialist economies that create binaries and margins that oppress and harm us.
The way you’re “supposed to be an academic” filters into one’s psyche.
Growing up in ballet and the struggle to let go, which led Serena to poetry and modern dance.
The best advice Serena has ever had, which came from a dance teacher.
How much extra work it takes BIPOC, queer, female-identified writers and artists to be artists.
Sources Mentioned
Selah Saterstroms's work, including the one I read from, Ideal Suggestions. Selah’s most recent book, Rancher, comes out this month. You can also schedule a reading with Selah through the practice she co-founded with Kristen E. Nelson, Four Queens Divination. Let me tell you—the two readings I had with Selah have changed my life, and I’m not being hyperbolic.
Lyn Hejinian's "The Rejection of Closure”
“Queer Phenomenology” by Sarah Ahmed
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are the two French philosophers who used the terms "rhizome" and "rhizomatic" (from Ancient Greek, to mean "mass of roots") to describe theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation (text here pulled straight from this Wiki entry).
Poet C.D. Wright.
José Esteban Muñoz and queerness as an “act of the horizon.”
The author that speaks of the rhizomatic text as a text that wants to lie down/refuses to stand up is Bhanu Kapil and the book of hers that Serena mentioned is “Ban en Banlieue.”
No Place to Go, the artist-made queer haunted house Serena collaborated on with Kate Speer and Frankie Toan.
And, Killjoy’s Kastle was the name of the lesbian, feminist haunted house that Serena couldn’t recall while we chatted, but which inspired No Place to Go.
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Credits
Audio engineering by the team at Upfire Digital.
All of my music is provided by the in-house musicians at Slip.stream.
Episode Transcript
Coming soon, hopefully! Would you be willing to help? Email me at brandi@thisplusthat.com!
